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10/19/12

Scale of the Universe - Be Amazed!

Everyone
knows the universe is huge, but most people don't understand how huge
it really is. This article will try to show the amazingly massive scale
of the universe to you. It surely is a very humbling experience!

Earth - Our Home

This is our Home. All of us live, love, wage wars, spend our entire lifetimes here.

Earth compared to smaller Planets in our Solar System

Earth compared to larger Planets in our Solar System

Compared to our Sun

Our Sun compared to other Stars

Our Sun is just a tiny speck compared to other stars!

Hard to even make out in the picture with the Sun just 1 pixel wide. Jupiter becomes invisible at this scale.

Milky Way - Our Galaxy

There are 200-400 billion stars in the Milky Way.

The
stellar disk of the Milky Way Galaxy is approximately 100,000
light-years in diameter, and is considered to be, on average, about
1,000 ly thick.

Our Milky Way galaxy is small compared to other galaxies. Our neighbouring Andromeda Galaxy has over one trillion stars!

The Observable Universe

This is a Hubble Ultra Deep Field image of a small region of the observable universe (equivalent sky area size shown in bottom left corner).

Each spot is a galaxy, consisting of billions of stars. There are more than 170 billion galaxies in the observable universe.